We are in a crisis in the evolution of human society. It’s unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can’t possibly happen again. Albert Bates, author of The Financial Collapse Survival Guide and Cookbook, brings you along on his personal journey.

161: the
number of countries in which environmental disasters, most of them
due to weather-related events, have caused mass displacement of
people since 2008.27 million: the
average number of people displaced by environmental disasters each
year between 2008 and 2013.350,000: migrants
seeking entry into the EU in 2014.

200 million: likely migrant number
seeking entry into the EU when the full impact of climate change is
felt.

— The Independent (London) 12
Sep 2015

(c) Marko Djurica/Reuters

“Masses
of young men in their twenties with beards singing Allahu Akbar
across Europe. It’s an invasion that threatens our prosperity, our
security, our culture and identity,”
far-right Dutch leader Geert Wilders said this week. As the EU
parliamentary council was debating how to react to the refugee crisis and
scaling up its quotas, Wilders called the wave of refugees “an
Islamic invasion of Europe.” Up
to 800,000 asylum seekers are set to be taken in by Germany by the
end of the year. At
the same time,
Hungarian prisoners were rushed to the Serbian border to construct a massive
fence, three meters high and topped with razor wire, to stop refugees
from crawling over the previous, lower border fence.
Shades of World War Z.

Buchenwald Gate: "To Each His Own."

Dramatic
footage from television in Europe shows people at Hungary's main refugee camp being
fed like wild animals. Crowds of men, women and children struggle to
catch bread thrown out from trucks. RT-TV called it "Hungary's Guantanamo." Meanwhile, refugees who made it into Germany earlier in the year are being housed in the barracks of the former Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald, near Weimar.

On the opposite side of the
country, Austria
halted train service with Hungary due to 'massive overburdening.'
Train
services between Denmark and Germany were stopped by the state
owned train operator,
DSB, because of exceptionally
tedious
passport checks at the
border.
In southern Denmark, police shut off a section of highway to
stop a march of a large group of migrants chanting "Sweden,
Sweden," the Associated Press reported September 9th. Just
to the east
that day, some 300 refugees, including children, were
seen entering
Denmark on foot from Germany.

European Commission President
Jean-Claude Juncker said on Wednesday that since the beginning of
2015 about 500,000 people had come to Europe, mainly Syrians and
Libyans. Half are children.
He urged EU member states to
"compulsorily"accept 160,000
migrants to residency within the EU over the next two years. Talk
about band-aid approaches. Since 2012 more than 6.5 million
Syrians have been displaced from their homes — 40% of the country's
population. They joined 5 million Palestinians already in exile, and
equal numbers of Afghans and Somalis.
Last year 435,000 people asked for asylum in the EU and 136,000 were awarded
it. The rest were deported or went underground.

“Today
we have a different category of refugees, they are not desperate,
starving, poor and unemployed people. No, they are mostly people with
average income who primarily seek peace. They need conditions for
work and education and European governments must apply effort to
this,”
the head of Russia’s Federal Migration Service told journalists.

In 2013 and 2014, over one million
people fled into Russia from southeast Ukraine after the US and its
NATO allies engineered the overthrow of government, installed a
puppet regime and threw the country into civil war and chaos. As the
armed conflict over eastern cities subsided, about 600,000 Ukrainians
decided never to return home. Of this number 114,000 took part in the Russian program of resettlement and received material aid and a
short track to citizenship.

In mid-June this year the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees said that in 2014 the influx of Ukrainian
citizens seeking refuge put the Russian
Federation in first place in the world by number of asylum
applications.

In 2013 the
number of people who fled their homes across the globe went over 50
million for the first time since World War II, a new UN report says.
Amnesty International blamed the UN for ineffective or delayed
responses, but the UN is understaffed and underfunded and can do
little more than issue warnings to belligerents that yet more
refugees will be produced for every bomb they drop.
“You know, there are 805
million food-insecure people in the world, and we only reach between
80-100 million of them on an annual basis,” Ertharin
Cousin, the chief of the UN World Food Programme, told reporters. In
total, there were 51.2 million refugees and 33.3 million internally
displaced people registered by the UN in 2013. Another 32,200 flee
their homes every day. Whenever she is meeting with Obama or
Putin, she said, she cannot bring up politics — it would be a waste of her time — she can only
attempt to bring to their attention the need for more aid.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said,
“You think migration is a challenge in Europe today because of
extremism, wait until you see what happens when there's an absence of
water, an absence of food, or one tribe fighting against another for
mere survival."

We may not need to wait long. "Syria was destabilized
by 1.5 million migrants from rural communities fleeing a three-year
drought that was made more intense and persistent by human-driven
climate change, which is steadily making the whole eastern
Mediterranean and Middle East region even more arid," says
Richard
Seager ofLamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory of Columbia University,
who published a reportin March on
the role of climate change in the Syrian conflict.

"Syria is not the only
country affected by this drying. Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Iraq and
Iran are too. However the various social, religious and ethnic wars
play out, in the coming years and decades the region will feel the
stress of declining water resources."

Seager has also studied the
Southwestern United States and what the future holds for that region.
Drawing upon nineteen
different climate modeling groups around the world, Seager
and his colleagues concluded that the California drought is only the start of a new
regime. “In the Southwest the levels of aridity seen in the 1950s
multiyear drought, or the 1930s Dust Bowl, become the new climatology
by mid-century,” theyreported.

A recent study from the group,
Organising to Advance Solutions in the Sahel, suggested that over the
next three to four decades up to 200 million Africans are likely to
be without sustainable food supplies. This assumes temperatures in
the Horn of Africa and Levant rise only 5°C by 2050 and that
population continues to grow from about 100 million now, to 300
million in 2050.

"It would be totally implausible
to sustainably accommodate this scale of growth," said the
report.

"Without immediate, large-scale action, death rates from
food shortages will rise as crops wither and livestock die, and the
largest involuntary migration in history could occur."

The Patrix

“We recapitulate the conditions that
create our fears, subconsciously wanting to relieve the original
stress, but then we make the same bad choices, because of our
conditioning, and so it goes, we have to do it again.”

Andy Langford is explaining The
Patrix, his term for our cultural prison. He confesses to being
middle class white anglo-saxon male, which means he was born to a
certain degree of privilege, although just one generation away from
mineworkers and growing up in Devonshire, and has often been back on
the endless, deceptive treadmill, required of his social class, to
advance out of poverty.

He gives the example of when he was a
cigarette smoker and he would find himself wanting to quit but giving
into another fag, then realizing he was breaking his vow, thinking of
himself as a bad person, a chronic loser, and weak-willed. He mimics
the slumped shoulders of a great weight bearing down on him as he
lowers his self-esteem.

“It's the oops moment,” he says,
“that has the real power.” It is the point at which you have the
first recognition that you are failing, that moment of cogent
observation, that is the point at which there is an opportunity for
intervention and change. Stub out the cigarette before you take a
last drag, or descend into the downward cycle of internalizing your
addiction with rationalizations and sublimations. The choice is
there. What do you do in that moment?

We are in the Gaia University tent at
the 2015 International Permaculture Convergence in England, and Andy
is explaining his theory of The Patrix to a couple dozen
permaculturists who want to know how it relates to climate change.

“We are very sensitive to being
hurt,” he explains. Hurt can be emotional or physical but we are
taught as children to put aside the pain and buck up, tough it out,
stop wingeing, and grow up. So instead of healing the emotional pain
on the spot by nurture, weeping, commiseration and other therapies,
we internalize the pain and it festers. “It becomes a veil of
distress, which later leads us to perverted behavior, such as
requiring our children to fall into the same pattern, or
institutionalizing it.” Our society becomes shaped, not by logic
but by self-oppression. We take out our unhealed hurts on others.

Andy says that climate change is, in a
warped sort of way, the echo of our collective near-extinction
experiences following supervolcanoes and meteor impacts. Some part of
us still recalls that pain, and so wishes to recreate similar crises
in hopes of healing our deep hurt from before. We have known for a
hundred years what we are doing to the atmosphere. We have known
since Malthus the inexorable math of population growth. We have known
since at least the Club of Rome report in 1971 about the limits to
natural resources and insufficient capacity of the planet to absorb
our wastes. We ignore our knowledge — we become ignorant —
in order to draw ourselves closer to another apocalypse.

We are fascinated with zombies. Scenes
of mass-migrations rivet our attention.

He reckons that if we were willing, we
could probably reverse 80% of this embedded hurt in twenty years. It
would take a lot of re-evaluation counseling, and permaculture has a
role to play. He invites people to contact him — patrix@gaiauniversity.org — if they'd like to join this discussion. Generally speaking, we aren't moving in that direction
at present, and so the climate crisis simply grinds away like
compound interest on our damaged psyches.

And somewhere on the road to Sweden,
another Syrian child whose feet ache and belly growls starts to cry
and is told to be brave, to stop crying, to hold it in and move
along.

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